It's not just here in Southern California where aircraft pilots are increasingly finding themselves temporarily blinded at nighttime by cheap, store-bought laser pointers–particularly ones with a more devastating green beam.
If you're dismissive of the potency of the laser on aircraft cockpits, checkout this BBC broadcast that illustrates not just the harm it can do but also that technology is making it easier to identify the source of a beam.
In recent years, police as well as commercial and private pilots have reported an increase in laser beam attacks in Orange County. It's a federal offense to purposely shine the beam into a cockpit. A Newport Beach man was recently fined $6,000 by the Federal Aviation Commission for two attacks on a police helicopter.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.